Amazon’s IMDb movie database now includes over 6,000 free videos from pre-airs of this seasons new television shows to classic movie favorites. Does the most authoritative movie and entertainment catalogue on the Internet have a secret recipe or is it over-reaching?

IMDb has long been known for listing the details of films and television shows alike from release date to cast and crew information. It has become the insiders haven for ferreting out details about forthcoming movies as they are released. Now this handy reference guide is hoping to be a source of entertainment as well.

The site is now offering episodes of hit shows such as The Simpsons, Family Guy, House, Heroes and 24 as well as classics like Star Trek and Charlie’s Angel. It also has recent and classic movies, though its collection seems to be a few years old at minimum.

IMDb is also latching onto the trend of pre-airing the season premier of some television shows. However, it seems to have the same titles as the other major online players like Hulu, carrying shows like the new Knight Rider and Lipstick Jungle.

While IMDb may be relatively well known, it is far behind sites like Hulu in forming content partnerships with television networks and movie studios. IMDb’s interface for finding and watching streaming video content is disjointed. While it is easy to find out whether the video is included on a show’s page, there is no central way to discover content.

Even Hulu has only just eked out one percent of online video market share in a vertical that is heavily dominated by Google’s YouTube user generated content site with almost half of the online market. The next nearest competitors each have single digit market share, including Fox, Yahoo and Microsoft.

It’s quite impressive to see Amazon rolling out this new feature in the face of a struggling online video market. Even with almost half of the market, Google has yet to effectively monetize YouTube traffic. It appears that Amazon will attempt to do so using smaller video to reduce bandwidth costs and by including pre-roll ads on its video.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 8:38 am under Online video.  Print This Post

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